England and Portugal first met in the World Cup 40 years ago. Alastair Reid wrote about it a couple of months later in The New Yorker in his roundup of England ‘66. It’s fascinating to read his account of the match, played when blanket TV coverage of sports, celebrity play-by-play commentators and instant replays (or action replays, as they were called in Britain) were all in their infancy, Bobby Charlton and Eusebio were in their prime, and good feeling reigned on the soccer field.

England had never before appeared in a World Cup semifinal, and, almost by sudden instinct, the wise men and soothsayers of football stopped predicting and started holding their breath. One columnist reported fancifully that a strange, flickering blue light hung over the whole country, a kind of television halo, and certainly those who had grumbled the loudest about having to sacrifice some of their favorite television serials for the lavish coverage of the World Cup had by now stopped caring whether or not the serials ever came back. I had watched a fair proportion of the games on television, and not only was the treatment technically beyond reproach but the strange tampering with the sequence of time that television is so easily able to indulge in had become almost part of our expectation. We had grown used not simply to seeing a goal scored but to seeing it over again almost immediately, then possibly a third time, in slow motion, to say nothing of being able to watch it later the same evening, and even the following day. The B.B.C. and Independent Television sportscasters had grown into family friends, as familiar as mailmen. And yet nothing quite equalled the experience of the games themselves, even though the goals were over in a flash, and did not immediately and mysteriously repeat themselves.
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Follow the action in Hamburg with Austin Kelley.
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Argentine fans at Novocento in SoHo explode as the ball hits the net for 1-0. (Photo: Rob Mackey)

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Follow the play by play of the quarterfinal match, LIVE as it happened at the Olympiastadion in Berlin. Jeff Z. Klein describes the action.
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In case you missed the news, FIFA on Wednesday announced the 12 referees who will continue at the World Cup. They are:

Toru Kamikawa (Japan)
Coffi Codjia (Benin)
Benito Archundia (Mexico)
Horacio Elizondo (Argentina)
Jorge Larrionda (Uruguay)
Mark Shield (Australia)
Massimo Busacca (Switzerland)
Frank De Bleeckere (Belgium)
Luis Medina Cantalejo (Spain)
Markus Merk (Germany)
Michel Lubos (Slovakia)
Roberto Rosetti (Italy)

Merk, Busacca and Cantalejo made our shortlist of egregious refereeing errors, although it must also be said that the superb way Busacca handled the Argentina-Mexico octavofinal helped make it the best game of the tournament so far.

The assignments for the quarterfinal games are:

GER-ARG: Lubos Michel
ITA-UKR: Frank De Bleeckere
ENG-POR: Horacio Elizondo
BRA-FRA: Luis Medina Cantalejo

The referees sent home were Graham Poll of England (shortlist), Valentin Ivanov of Russia (shortlist), Essam Abd el Fatah of Egypt, Shamsul Maidin of Singapore, Eric Poulat of France, Marco Rodriguez of Mexico, Carlos Amarilla of Paraguay, Oscar Ruiz of Colombia, and Carlos Simon of Brazil.

Germany-Argentina: the match of the tournament so far! There isn’t much time: you must study up now, because if the people you’re going to watch the game with switch off ESPN, who else is going to fill the vital need for the recitation of obscure facts about the two teams? It’s down to you . . . and we’re here to help.

We begin with the TV ads the players do in their home countries. Oliver Kahn stars in this German beer commercial. He’s sitting in a beer garden in a bad mood, but when he’s served a tall one his mood brightens. “The bench is the best place to be after all,